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Prof. Norma Joseph (photo from Association for Canadian Jewish Studies)

On June 2, the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies is holding a day of lectures in the Jewish community that will be topped off with music from the Vancouver Jewish Folk Choir, the granting of the 2019 Louis Rosenberg Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished Service Award to scholar and activist Norma Joseph and a talk by Franklin Bialystok on Canadian Jewish Congress.

“We offer a community day every year, and it’s always the opening day of the conference,” co-organizer Jesse Toufexis told the Independent.

“The motivations for the community day are plentiful,” said Toufexis. “Firstly, we receive great support in a number of ways from Jewish communities all over Canada, so this is an excellent way not only to thank them but to show them what the scholarly community is up to.

“Secondly, the Jewish community is interested in the topics we cover, from history to sociology to literature and art. So, coming from fields where we work on such minutely detailed projects, it’s fun to engage with a community that gets excited about the topics we ourselves find exciting.

“Thirdly, I think holding a community day is just part of a tradition that fosters togetherness. We aren’t scholars out in the ether, doing our own thing and keeping it to ourselves. I think of us more as a branch of a much larger Canadian Jewish community that includes all the various roles and aspects of Jewish life in this country, and I think it’s something of a duty to share what we’re constantly learning about our common past, present and future.”

Prof. Rebecca Margolis, ACJS president, praised Toufexis and co-organizer Prof. Richard Menkis on having “put together an amazing community day together in partnership with a team of local organizations that have gone above and beyond to make this day a success: Jewish Museum and Archives of B.C. and our host, the Peretz Centre for Secular Jewish Culture. As a member-run organization,” she said, “we value opportunities to collaborate with local organizations in order to produce exciting programming on the Jewish Canadian experience.”

The first panel session of the day is Jewish Space in Literature and Popular Culture, followed by Antisemitism and the Holocaust. At lunch, a panel discusses the topic Archives Matter. The two afternoon panels are Media Studies, and Challenging the Status Quo. Joseph’s talk in this last session is called No Longer Silent: Iraqi Jewish Immigrants and the CJC.

“I’ve been working on the Iraqi Jewish community in a bunch of different ways and my most recent publications are about their food and what we can learn about their cultural history and immigration patterns through studying their food,” Joseph told the Independent in a phone interview from her home in Montreal. “But I’ve also looked at, through the immigration pattern, the traumas they suffered by the expulsion from Iraq and the processes through which they had to escape from Iraq, as well as the ways in which they adapted to life in Montreal.”

It is only in the last decade or two, said Joseph, that Iraqi Jewish community members have “begun to present their memoirs and talk about how awful the experience from the Farhud in 1941 was. So, then I began to gather their stories.”

Joseph is particularly interested in the transition of the community from being unwilling to talk about their experiences to talking about them. “And also,” she said, “in the process of [preparing for] this year’s conference, which is celebrating 100 years of Canadian Jewish Congress, to figure out in what ways did Canadian Jewish Congress help or not help this community migrate or emigrate into Canada, which was, in fact, to Montreal. And that’s where I’m doing research right now. The Iraqi Jews themselves say, oh no, they didn’t help us … we came alone, we found our way on our own and nobody ever helped us. We didn’t ask for help. We weren’t refugees…. End of story.”

This perspective, as well as the larger Jewish community’s focus at the time on dealing with the impacts of the Holocaust, contributed to the silence, said Joseph.

“I wanted to go behind the scenes and say, OK, but in what ways that they [Iraqi Jews] might not have known was Congress working with the Government of Canada to open the doors, because we know that the doors of Canada were closed to Jewish immigration during World War Two but, afterwards, in the 1950s the doors open…. Did anyone in Congress help Middle Eastern Jews come? That’s my question. And that’s what I’m researching now at the archives, interviewing some people.”

Joseph’s interest in the Iraqi Jewish community comes in part from her and her husband Howard’s experiences.

“In 1970,” she said, “we came to Canada [from the United States]. He was invited to become the rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation. He was their rabbi for 40 years. And the congregation has many different communities – it has Iraqis, Lebanese, Moroccan, some Iranians, and we love the diversity of communities, the cultural diversity was so exciting.

“I never thought of studying the communities that we were friendly with and that my husband was the rabbi of, but, eventually, at some point, somebody said to me, why don’t you study Canadian Jews? And I looked around me at all these wonderful, diverse ethnic communities of Jews and I said, oh, this is a great idea, why not study the people I know so well?

“And I was interested in gender. I started asking a lot of questions and I especially focused on the women. And it came out that they were willing to talk to me, especially about food, and food was an entree into learning about their experiences, both in Baghdad and the transitions to Montreal and how hard those transitions were…. They couldn’t find the right foods and they didn’t know how to cook and there were no cookbooks and how were they going to cook and where were they going to find the spices? That was very symbolic of life, the difficulties of life in Montreal for this community that didn’t like gefilte fish.”

Joseph is being honoured by the ACJS for attaining the “highest standards of scholarship, creative and effective dissemination of research, and activism in a manner without rival in our field of Canadian Jewish studies, as well as being a respected voice in Jewish feminist studies more broadly.” Not only is she being recognized for “her mastery of both traditional rabbinic sources and anthropological methods,” but her teaching, her work in documentary and educational film, being a founding member of the Canadian Coalition of Jewish Women for the Get, as well as participating in the founding of the Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies at Concordia University, among many other accomplishments. For more than 15 years, she has written a regular column in the Canadian Jewish News. In one of these columns, in recent months, she recalled a time “when the phrase ‘liberal values’ was not a dirty word.”

“I was raised Orthodox,” she told the Independent. “My grandfather was a great Orthodox rabbi in Williamsburg…. But my parents worked very, very hard to send me to one of the great liberal Orthodox schools. It was called the Yeshivah of Flatbush, where boys and girls study together and we were taught that boys and girls could learn, and girls were included in that equation. It was one of the best schools because I learned fluent Hebrew, which was very rare, and it was a Zionist school, beginning in the ’50s.”

She added, “It wasn’t our liberal values in the 21st century, but it was mid-20th-century values. We learned to love Israel. We learned about justice, we learned about equality in some very interesting ways. We were patriotic Americans, my country right or wrong, which, after Vietnam, we had to rejig, but we were there before Vietnam…. I’ll tell you another thing that’s interesting about my upbringing – we didn’t learn about the Holocaust. At that age, in the ’50s and ’60s, parents didn’t want their children traumatized by stories of the Holocaust.”

Between her own studies of Jewish law and those of her husband, Joseph lauded the insight and flexibility that can be found in Judaism. “My husband always taught me that, if you are a legalist, are in charge of the law … the easiest answer is no, because it means you don’t have to examine and search the law. The hardest thing, but most creative thing, is to find a way to say yes…. We have thousands of years of law – surely in all that precedent you can find something.”

As but one example, Joseph has used Jewish law to argue for the rights (and obligations) of women, and has seen progress on the feminist front.

“For example,” she said, “let’s just take the world of bat mitzvah. In the 1950s, there weren’t bat mitzvahs, for the most part. Even the Conservative and Reform movements didn’t want bat mitzvahs…. Today, 2019, there isn’t a community that doesn’t offer some form of recognition of a girl’s 12th birthday,” including Chassidic communities.

“That’s a transformation because of feminist critique,” she said. “They will never admit it. They will say we always did it. But that’s a big change, on one hand. On the other hand, it’s silly, it’s narishkeit; it’s small, it’s nothing.”

But even incremental change leads to larger change, and Joseph spoke about the “incredible historical research coming out – women [always] had strong ritual lives, but what’s coming out now is the need for public ritual formats for women in all sectors of society.”

For the full schedule of and to register for the ACJS community day, visit eventbrite.ca.

Khalaf and Gawre’s family is the 10th to come to Winnipeg thanks to Operation Ezra. (photo from Michel Aziza)

What started as a small local initiative has grown to be a leader, by example, and a reminder of what can be achieved when an intention is set and action is taken.

About a year ago, the Jewish Independent ran a story about Operation Ezra in Winnipeg that, at the time, was aiming to sponsor five Yazidi refugee families. Led by Michel Aziza, a local businessman and once a refugee himself (from Morocco), and a small group of individuals connected to the Jewish community, the initiative was a response to the plight of the Yazidi people being viciously persecuted by ISIS in Iraq.

Nafiya Naso, now a young woman, who came to Winnipeg as a child with her family, has been an instrumental figure in Operation Ezra.

“She was reaching out to people outside their community to raise awareness of the genocide that was going on, March of 2015,” said Aziza, recalling Naso’s early involvement. “I was semi-retired and looking for something to occupy myself, and this was a good opportunity for me to get involved with a volunteer-type of project. Essentially, that’s what I have been involved with over the last almost three years.

“At the beginning,” he said, “we knew nothing about the Yazidi people. After talking with Nafiya, we identified a family of eight people and thought we could raise the necessary funds to submit a sponsorship application. We started lining up a few speaking engagements for Nafiya…. We started speaking to people, making calls, and … the original target was $34,000 for this family of eight … [and] within three or four weeks, we raised $34,000. And that number kept on growing as people talked to other people.”

To date, with the generous help of people in Winnipeg and elsewhere, Operation Ezra has raised just over $500,000. This has made it possible for them to sponsor 10 Yazidi families – 55 people – with the last family having arrived in March.

“As soon as we realized this was bigger than a grassroots project, we decided to incorporate Operation Ezra within the organized Jewish community,” said Aziza.

Jewish Child and Family Service (JCFS) saw this as an opportunity to do something in line with what they were already doing – helping with the settlement of immigrants and refugees – so they came on board, gradually reaching out to other organizations and agencies.

Gray Academy of Jewish Education and the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba joined the effort and, currently, Operation Ezra is an umbrella group of some 20 different agencies and organizations. Most of the members are Jewish, but not all. There are two churches involved, the Salvation Army and a number of corporate partners, with IKEA being the biggest name.

Many volunteers help Operation Ezra in various aspects of the settlement process. Naso has been hired by JCFS to manage everything.

One service Operation Ezra offers is an English-as-an-additional-language (EAL) program, which takes place at a synagogue every Thursday, with 70 to 80 refugees attending and about 20 volunteer teachers. Some Yazidi participants are government-sponsored.

Out of the total 250 refugees who are government-sponsored, about 100 have asked for help from Operation Ezra. “So, we are touching the lives of about 200 people,” said Aziza. “We have organized and have helped organize many community events for the Yazidi people. We celebrated Yazidi New Year’s 6768 on April 18, 2018, with a very large number of people coming out for that dinner,” he said by way of example. “We’re trying to help this group of newcomers to get organized, and to organize themselves as a community … to socialize and to help each other and so on.”

According to Aziza, Operation Ezra is the only multifaith group doing this work in North America.

One recipient family of Operation Ezra is Majid and Safya, along with their children. They shared their thoughts on their experience to date, with translating help as needed from Naso.

“My name is Majid. I was born and raised in a small village…. I am married with two kids – one boy who is 4 and one girl who is 6. My wife, Safya, and I are currently enrolled in EAL classes, hoping to learn English and find work in the near future.

“On August 3rd, 2014, at around 9 a.m., my family, community members and I fled to Mount Sinjar. We were lucky to have escaped when we did. If we had stayed any longer, I would be in a mass grave with many other Yazidis. I can still hear the rapid gunfire as ISIS members surrounded everyone who wasn’t able to flee and started shooting.

“We then reached Mount Sinjar, where we stayed for seven days with little to no food or water. As we were coming down the mountain closer to the Kurdistan region, we were able to hop into a truck. But, soon after, we saw ISIS members driving at us, firing round after round. I still don’t know how we escaped that day. Everything was such a blur. All I really remember was covering my kids and wife, hoping they would make it. Fortunately, we all made it to a refugee camp in Dohuk.

“The conditions in the camp were very scary. We were always worried about getting enough to eat, drink … about medical treatment. And we stayed for a few months, but couldn’t make it. So, we left for Turkey hoping for better living conditions.

“After spending almost two years in Turkey,” he said, “we heard about Operation Ezra and reached out. And, by some miracle, we were sponsored. Everything felt like it was going to be OK after we received confirmation we would be coming to Canada.

“I will never forget the welcome we received coming down at the airport. I was in awe of all the people who had come to greet us and welcome us into their community.”

Majid said they arrived in Canada in December 2016. “My experience in Canada has been great and could not be any better!” he said. “I have many friends and family who are in refugee camps in Iraq and Turkey who call me and tell me that the situation in the camp is getting worse by the day. My dreams are that my family and I are able to live in Canada without the fear we faced back home – the constant fear for our lives, hate and discrimination we faced because of our religious beliefs.

“I encourage all Canadians to reach out to Operation Ezra and learn about this amazing program, the only program of its kind in the world today. We have thousands of Yazidi still living in segregated refugee camps, fearing for their lives and waiting for anyone to reach out and lend a helping hand. I also encourage the Canadian government to support groups like Operation Ezra to help out more refugees.”

Khalaf and Gawre’s family are the most recent Operation Ezra arrivals to Winnipeg. (Although they were the last family Operation Ezra had planned to sponsor, the group has unanimously decided to continue their efforts.)

“My name is Khalaf and I arrived in Winnipeg on March 29th with my mother, who is 83 years old, my wife, and five kids – two boys and three girls, ages ranging from 12 to 24. I was ripped away from my four older kids after ISIS attacked our village (Dugere).

“At 8 a.m., we heard gunshots and got calls from other Yazidi villages that ISIS had murdered hundreds of men and was kidnapping all the women and young girls. Ten minutes later, my family and I started walking toward the mountain. My mom and dad were so lucky they were able to get rides to the refugee camp in Dohuk. My wife, Gawre, and five children were stranded on the mountain for seven days.

“We were able to escape the mountain with the help of PKK [Kurdistan Workers’ Party]. We lived in a refugee camp on Dohuk for six months. The conditions were horrible and heartbreaking. Many people died in the camps, because there was no humanitarian aid, no water and no medical care. My father passed away, because we could not get him the medical attention he needed.

“Shortly after, we decided to go to Turkey. It was no better there, but we did not have a choice and could not afford to move back to Iraq again.

“My sister and her family were sponsored by Operation Ezra just over a year ago. We got on the list when we heard about this amazing project from the people in the refugee camp.

“Months after contacting Nafiya [Naso] and Asmaeil, we were told we would be sponsored! My family and I definitely won the lottery here. We will always be grateful for everyone who made this possible.

“My dream is to see my family and Yazidis around the world live free of persecution. We hope and encourage all Canadian and other countries around the globe to support groups like Operation Ezra and help them in saving lives.”

Naso added, “Operation Ezra is working to raise more funds and keep sponsoring Yazidi refugees. There are thousands waiting who are in desperate need of help. They have no voice, so we must be a voice for them and speak out for them.”

From left to right: Rabbi Dan Moskovitz, Meha Qewas, the Hon. Jody Wilson-Raybould, Hesen Mostefa, Brenda Karp and two of the Mostefas’ children. (photo from Temple Sholom)

“I am not scared,” says Meha Qewas, sitting at her small dining table with her 1-year-old daughter on her lap. In front of us is a plate of knefa, a very rich, sweet cheese dish covered in syrup, together with huge tumblers of juice many times bigger than what I’m used to being offered. Meha clearly values hospitality. The only thing sweeter than the mid-morning “snack” is the ebullience and warmth that flows out of Meha and her husband Hesen Mostefa.

When she says she is fearless, Meha is talking about finding work in Vancouver. Despite the challenges, she is confident both in her new friends in the Vancouver Jewish community and in her own ability to master English and overcome whatever other obstacles she may meet. Her confidence is not groundless: Meha was the main force behind and organizer of getting her husband and three children first out of Syria, then out of Iraq, the country where they took refuge for five years. “I wanted my children out of there,” she says, recalling the sight of Syrian children and youth in Iraq taking up smoking and selling candy on the street to make income for their families in the packed, rat-infested refugee housing.

Hesen also has a remarkable story to tell. Trained as a surgeon in Syria, he volunteered in Iraq with Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), which eventually hired him as a doctor. During the years they spent in Iraq, Hesen put in long days with MSF while Meha struggled to take care of the children, run a household and plan their flight from Iraq. Eventually, Meha succeeded in securing passage to Canada with the help of sponsors from Vancouver’s Temple Sholom.

Temple Sholom’s efforts to sponsor Syrian refugees started with a High Holidays sermon from Rabbi Dan Moskovitz about the refugees’ plight. Members of the shul immediately formed a committee of volunteers to bring in at least one family, and others, if possible.

Meetings with the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver and the Anglican Diocese followed (the diocese is a federally approved sponsor for refugees with which other groups can team). The committee learned about private sponsorship and began working through Mosaic, a local agency that serves newcomers and refugees, and were connected to the Mostefas. The process to bring them to Canada was started.

In December 2015, however, Canada pulled some immigration services out of Iraq and began working through Jordan. A letter that Moskovitz gave to Senator Mobina Jaffer about the Mostefa family and their situation apparently found its way to the prime minister, and services in Iraq were reinstated as a result.

“In the end, over 200 people from shul got involved,” Moskovitz said. “I met personally with anyone who expressed concern about whether bringing in the refugees was a good idea. Most got on board with the initiative and I’m happy to say that, now that they [the Mostefas] are here, everyone in the community is thrilled.”

The synagogue’s efforts did not end there. They have since brought in another family, Bawer Issa, Shinhat Ahmed and their newborn son. The Issa family was welcomed at a Shabbat service in the synagogue on Aug. 25 (it can be seen on YouTube). Bawer spoke movingly at that event, recounting how some people had asked him if he was surprised, as a Muslim, that he had been rescued by Jews.

“We were not surprised,” he told the congregation. “Growing up in Iraq, we were brainwashed at school every day to hate Israelis and Jews as our number one enemy. My Kurdish father always told us not to care what they said, not to believe it. He told us that Israel had been the first to send aid when Saddam Hussein bombed us with chemical weapons.” Citing Israel’s continued support for Kurdish self-rule, Bawer said that he had already known that Jews were their friends.

At the upcoming biennial meeting in Boston of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the umbrella organization of the Reform movement, a resolution – that Moskovitz helped write – will call for the sponsorship of 36 more refugee families by Canadian congregations.

The wider Vancouver community is invited to welcome the Issa and Mostefa families on Sept. 10, at 11:30 a.m., at a reception at Temple Sholom that also marks the first day back of the synagogue’s Hebrew school. An RSVP is requested to 604-266-7190 or via templesholom.ca/get-know-new-canadians.

Matthew Gindinis a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He writes regularly for the Forward and All That Is Interesting, and has been published in Religion Dispatches, Situate Magazine, Tikkun and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.

Extremists have taken over much of Iraq, spreading medieval theology using modern weaponry, leaving hundreds of corpses and severed heads in their wake. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, has been disowned by the umbrella that spawned it, al-Qaeda. ISIS is said to be more extreme and more anti-American than al-Qaeda. Extremism seems to have taken an even more extreme turn.

The ostensibly democratic government in Iraq that resulted from the American intervention there ended up being dominated by Iraqi Shi’ites, which is part of the reason the Sunni extremists of ISIS have been met with, if not a hero’s welcome in parts of Iraq, at least with little resistance. The lack of resistance is partially due to the propensity of American-trained Iraqi soldiers and police to drop their weapons and flee in the face of ISIS, which observers say is a reaction to a lack of commitment to the ideals of democratic government – a product of the failure of the government to live up to the hopes of the post-Saddam Hussein era. It is also a reflection of just how brutal ISIS has been in its onslaught.

While the capital city of Baghdad was not under immediate threat by ISIS (as of press time this week) Iraq as a country seems effectively inoperative. All of the effort, lives, injuries and expense of the American and allied intervention there may prove to have been for naught. The new reality is far from clear, but all appearances suggest things are worse than ever.

So desperate is the situation that Iran may be our new ally in the conflict. The Shi’ite extremists who run Iran have come to the aid of the American-installed, Shi’ite-dominated government in Baghdad, sending Iranian Revolutionary Guards to help fight the Sunni ISIS. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, a leading hawk who no one accuses of being soft on Tehran, accommodates the new bedfellow by comparing the situation with the West’s alliance with Stalin during the Second World War.

A wild-eyed optimist might even see this bizarre situation as a backdoor route to a new entente with the heretofore-implacable Iran. Were this catastrophe to have a silver lining of bridging the chasm between Iran and the West, it would be based on our mutual interest in an intra-Muslim sectarian conflict – and it is hard to see how anything good could come from our getting mired in something like that. In fact, the engagement of Western forces in Middle Eastern and Asian situations we really do not well understand may be the greatest lesson of this entire mess. The determination of George W. Bush for “regime change” in Iraq (something his father had, in hindsight, the wisdom to stop short of) unleashed a firestorm of consequences. Saddam was a murderous tyrant, but the current situation presents for Iraqis all the horrors of his dictatorship and more – plus unprecedented instability for the entire region.

Where we go from here is something the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama and other allied leaders are pondering now. And they may be as baffled as the rest of us. Given the West’s past failures in the region, it is hard to be hopeful.